"Scream 4" Stars' Scariest Moments Were Off-Camera

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The cast of “Scream 4” is ready to deliver some big screams on the big screen, but things got REALLY scary behind the scenes.

Although maybe nothing that sounds as horrifying as what David Arquette pulled on the first “Scream” movie back in 1996 when the camera’s weren’t rolling: “I ran around in Gale's dress and a trenchcoat in the first film,” Arquette admits. “That was pretty frightening, if you've ever seen my calves."

On the current installment, reviving director Wes Craven’s genre-deconstruction horror franchise for the first time in a decade, Hayden Panettiere got the worst of it in a classically styled “who’s-hiding in-the-closet?” take. “We were doing a scene in the bedroom and we think the killer might be in the closet,” Panettiere remembers. “And we open the closet: He's not there. Then all of a sudden he WAS there, but he wasn't supposed to be there. There was this prop guy who scared me half to death!”

“He disappeared and I didn't see him until the next day,” the actress continues. “I was looking around for him and I didn't see him until the next day. He said, 'Dude, I wanted to come back, but I felt so bad. You were so scared.' So he definitely got me. You try to front like you're all tough, and then something jumps out of the closet.”

Emma Roberts may have experienced her biggest freak-out while simply watching the film – and her fear factor may be genetic. “I'm really easily scared,” Roberts confesses. “I was covering my eyes through most of 'Scream 4' – and I was in the movie. I saw it with my mom. She was like, 'Honey, I love you, but I have to step out for a moment because I'm too scared.' I said, 'You're too scared? It's me.' She said, 'It's just scary.' So we were all horrified. I was sitting next to a bunch of people and we were all in our seats with our knees up.”

Since she signed on to the film, Roberts also constantly falling for her friends’ admittedly lame attempts to unnerve her. “My friends keep calling me and doing the [Ghostface] voice, saying 'What's your favorite scary movie?'” she says. “As much as I know it's a joke I still can't help but be looking over my shoulder a little bit, because it's creepy.”

Co-star Rory Culkin also learned that scare pranks can too often turn on their perpetrators. “When I was younger I actually had a Ghostface mask and I stood in my sister's room in the corner for like a half hour until she saw me in the reflection behind her,” he recalls. “She freaked out and started slapping me.”

Only Anthony Anderson seems to not have a good scaring-the-crap-out-of-someone story. “I grew up in an area where if you scared someone you got your ass whooped,” he says. “So no, we didn't play those games.”